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Saturday, February 1, 2014

Down With 2013 Giants, and Arp With 2014 Dodgers

I completed a few trades at the close of 2013, and it's about time I give up some props to those awesome trade partners - whom I'm looking forward to making even more trades with in 2014.

First up is a perfect example of what makes our hobby so cool. As we all know, the Dodgers and the Giants have one of the most storied - and violently heated - rivalries in sports. The bad blood between the teams goes all the way back to when the clubs were just a streetcar's ride apart in the old time boroughs of New York. The hatred for the other team's uniforms continues to burn to this day, unfortunately leading to bloodshed between the fans more often than any hard collisions between the players out on the basepaths.

Which brings me back to our cool hobby. Out here in the blogoworlds, Dodger and Giants fans read each other's blogs, Yankee and Red Sox die hards trade unwanted cards of their rivals to each other, and fans from other rivalries, old and new, comment on each other's blogs and even meet up in real life as friends. Aint it grand?

I'm always able to pass off cards of the hated Giants to good ol' Arpsmith, and his unwanted Dodgers can always find a good home in my binders. Although, now that I think of it, this trade was started by me actually shipping a Dodger card TO Arpsmith!

He was collecting the Double Play set of game cards and I offered to send him an upgrade for his misprint Claude Osteen card. Let's lead off with that clean but misprinted card that Arp sent to me...

Arpsmith sent over some sweet extra cards as well. Naturally, being the cool Giants fan that he is, he sent over more Dodgers...

You say Lou Brock? You say Ricky H? I say Maury Wills. He's the guy that reinvented the game and made the stolen base a (once again) legitimate and dangerous offensive weapon.

The card was apparently part of some giveaway sets with messages about fire safety on the rear. Check out Smokey the Bear's ever-lovin' mug under Mr. Wills.

What's better than a Hideo Nomo card that you never had before?

BAAAAMMMM !!! Having its matching mini of course.

Batting clean up is the man whom I dubbed El Jaguar last season...

I'm sure that baseball fans from San Diego to Oakland can appreciate the flag of the great Bear Republic gracing this hunka awesome cardboard. What a glorious backdrop for A-Gon.

THANKS for the great trade, Arpsmith !

BTW, a reminder that you all have until Super Bowl kickoff to enter ATBATT's first contest of 2014.
See yesterday's post for details.

2 comments:

The "Double Play" cards as you called them are the 1968 Topps Baseball "Game" inserts. The sub-set has 33 cards of popular players of the day. I think most of them were the All-Stars. Like many of Topps' card games there don't seem to be any Official Rules supplied. I guess the assumed kids would know how to play it. It also seems to be assumed that everyone would be able to get ALL the cards to play the dang game. I'm pretty sure it was just a case of you would shuffle your "deck" and turn over the top card to see what the result of the play was, then keep turning over cards until you got 3 outs, etc...Simulating a "real" game by turning over the cards.